dear amanda and julianne,

last year i sent out e-mails every now and then with bits of classical music. and marc would send me an e-mail with a piece of art. and amy would send out a poem. and then this blog was born.
i'm still sending out clips of music, but i don't have your e-mail addresses and soundbits can't be given out on the blogosphere - could you pass them to me? (and anyone else who might want inclusion.)

much love.

the power of white.

we watched a documentary on robert ryman in my painting class the other day. suddenly, everything i've been painting has been turning out... white.

Renewal

"It is the function of art to renew our perception.
What we are familiar with we cease to see.
The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it."

--Anais Nin

Tarek Eltayeb

Even though there were so many things to talk about from today (Pancake Parades, the Broadcast, a quinoa-filled potluck), I wanted to tell you about Tarek Eltayeb because his soul was gentle and he smiled large and sincerely and leaned forward, eager and interested in conversation. he told me about his wife, her love of music, how he recently bought her a piano so she could make music live in their home. and he told me about his poems, his paintings, and these are a few i want to share with you because they are lovely, lovely, lovely:

First Kisses

From a distance, I stopped and gazed at them
In the garden:
A girl and a boy
She was kissing him
And each time she kissed him he’d wipe his mouth
After the final kiss, she took his hand
He laughed
And this time he kissed her
While their hands were intertwined
My heart sung
A cry of joy just about
Escaped from me; it nearly ruined
A resplendent ritual

Vienna; May 21st, 2001
(translated from Arabic by Kareem James Abu Zeid;
from “Takhlisat (In Clear)”. Irhab al-ayn al-bayda. Poetry, Merit Publishing House, Cairo 2002)

after my heartbreak

word for word.

The Museum would like...

I saw the Richard Misrach exhibition at the National Gallery of Art the day before they took it down. Misrach (b. 1949) does these ginourmous chromogenic prints of people on the beach and in the water from the top floors of a Hawaiian hotel he was staying in.

I caught myself searching through all the lounging people for...myself, scrutinizing each face to see if it was me. Completely bizarre really, checking someone else's image of the world to see if you're represented, searching for reassurance that you have a place, that you were able to eke out your own patch of beach.Well apparently this up close soul searching made the museum nervous, because a 16 year-old museum employee interrupted me to say, "Sir, The Museum would like to remind its patrons to stand at least one foot away from the photographs."

What if we hadn't left the Garden?

Every day for about a week now I've been going over Hieronymous Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" - a triptych depicting 3 scenes: the Joining of Adam and Eve, A Garden of the World, and the third is a scene from Hell. I like scrolling through the painting and absorbing all his vivid imagery - a bird swallowing humans while sitting on his thrown, people making love in clams, etc.
I've been concentrating a lot on the center panel, and I guess my interpretation is what would the world be like if the Fall had never happened, if we had never left the garden...

Make sure that you click on the image so you can see it in its large self

If I May,

I'd like to recommend a friend's blog to everyone who reads this because she, like many of you dear people, is one of those who seeks good and beautiful things and finds them and then goes out and creates more good and beautiful things whenever and wherever she can.

Madame Tutli Putli

Existenial stop-animation short film. Need I say more:

Part 1:


Part 2:

i wish i could embed this, but

one of the students i taught english to over the summer was a successful jazz pianist and music composer. this is one of her music videos and oh, it makes me miss korea so much.

an adult dollhouse, of sorts

alex showed me these photos while describing an architectural exhibit he viewed in the hayward gallery in london.
"haven't we all wanted, at some time, to smash things up, wreck the house, punch the walls and send the furniture flying?", or so says the review, which describes it perfectly.

phenomenal.

Eugene de Salignac

my dear friend megruth shared this with me and it is awesome:

Brooklyn Bridge, showing painters on suspenders, October 7, 1914

if you want beauty

then fall is the answer. and so is this, camille utterback's wonderful, lovely, thoughtful, lyrical text rain. (watch the quicktime documentation.) letters fall on your body and your body tells the letters how to make a word, a phrase, a line of poetry.

Love is a Battlefield: Zaw Moe Kyaw's story

I must tell you all this story, because the words and images from it haven't been able to leave me, and maybe also in the spirit of Lia, to share something of my own.

In modern times there are no fairy godmothers, but sometimes there are wise former guerilla soldiers. I went to his apartment so we could finish a video project we've been working on about a young monk, one of the leaders of the Saffron Revolution last fall. "I told the soldiers that we were praying with love for peace for everyone, including you. But he said he didn't understand and that we must leave or else he would shoot."

Zaw Moe Kyaw made me some Burmese food before getting to work and we talked in broken Thai, Burmese, and English phrases - "kun chuap aa hann thai mai ka?" so that we would not forget these languages. He pulled out some old photos he found while moving, of him when he lived in the jungle. "These are my comrades" and he points to them, "yes he died later after being arrested in Thailand, and he died of malaria." He moves slowly as he turns the photos. Throughout the night he would pick them up and stare at each a long time, at him with long hair, at the photos of funerals, for that was the only time they really took photos.

He is sad I'm leaving for Thailand and wants to come to. He is done sitting in an office, done going into a tunnel then coming out then going into the hole of the RFA office, then coming out to only go into a hole again. He describes to me his dream life if Burma was free. "I want to have a lot of land, with some, how do you call them "orchards", is that right? And have some wildlife, maybe some of those deer about the size of horses, I saw them in the jungle often. (I tell him he needs a pet elephant). Lots of land where I can be a cowboy, and I'll wear the hat you got me in Texas. I also will be an MP for my town, and maybe start a college where people can go to school, you should come teach there."

Awhile later we spoke of love. I do that quasi-joking voice and I say, haha, how moving to Thailand will be good and will help me to progress, then I sigh as only an adolescent with a broken heart can sigh. He says "You must move on Thelma, life is like water. You are young, enjoy life!" And then he tells me his story, and I must tell you this, because hearing it has changed me.

He loved a girl in his hometown in Burma. "I would get excited just being near her." And then the revolution of '88 happened and by '91 the military regime was hunting him down, so he had to flee to the jungle. The night before him and his comrades were to leave he asked them to wait for him in Rangoon because he had to go to his town to say goodbye to her. She was young then, only 17. "This better be important what you have to say to me" she says "I have my big exams tomorrow." He tells her he is leaving but "please wait for me." The only things he takes with him are his ID card and her photo.

"For 10 years Thelma, I didn't have a girlfriend, I only thought of her. I would be hiking through mountain sides and be thinking of her. I would be out at night checking for enemy soldiers, marching through the dark forest and pretending to have conversations with her in my head." No contact with her ever.

After awhile he left life in the jungle and went to work with Burmese exile groups in Thailand, had his eyes opened and knew that it was time to move on. Got an American girlfriend, a British, a Thai one and eventually started working with his current girlfriend in the office of Burma's socialist political party, DPNS.

Four years ago he moved to the States and starting working for Radio Free Asia, which secretly broadcasts news inside Burma. Through this she, yes she, hears his voice and writes him a letter telling him that she has never married, that she waited for him. "But I had changed, life had changed. I told some friends in my town to take care of her, but what was I to do now?"

How could I speak after hearing this? I silently returned to fixing the subtitles, with pain changing U Gawsita's statement of 'I live in Maggin monastery" to "I lived in Maggin monastery."

"Thelma, in Burmese, the word for 'marriage' roughly means 'house arrest"

"No, you are joking."

"No, I am serious. Listen to me, you are young. Flexibility and freedom are amazing things, embrace it!" Then he laid on the floor, with his hands behind his head and I'm fairly certain he was dreaming of getting away from office life, or perhaps fighting again, or maybe just about his orchards.

A guerilla leader, named Moetheezun who now lives in Queens, NY, once put a sign in the camps in the jungle "Revolution is school." Zaw Moe Kyaw never was able to finish college, but he tells me this, and I'm sure that the monk that was on the screen in front of me knows this to, "love is when you want the happiness of another, even if it goes against our own desires."

small, quiet perfection

Reading James Agee's "Knoxville: Summer of 1915" is one of those small, quiet perfections that both startles and overwhelms me with its lyricism, its gentleness, its ability to love the things around it. It is a short essay, about being a boy in Knoxville. About summer evenings when the whole neighborhood comes out, when streetlights flicker on, when fathers roll up their sleeves and water the lawns in chorus, when families lie in the grass staring at the stars and feeling the warmth of dear bodies all around. I hope you get a chance to read the whole essay but here are the last two paragraphs, which are both a remembrance and a prayer (which are, so often, one and the same):

On the rough wet grass of the back yard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there. First we were sitting up, then one of us lay down, and then we all lay down, on our stomachs, or on our sides, or on our backs, and they have kept on talking. They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine, quiet, with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.

After a little while I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.

Cause to Celebrate

Joey Franklin, Patrick Madden, and Brian Doyle in the same issue. Thank you, Brevity!